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This series contains governing documents, membership lists, event flyers, meeting minutes, internal memos and correspondence for the Student Homophile League (SHL), the first collegiate gay student organization in the country, founded in 1967 by Stephen Donaldson (a.k.a. Robert A. Martin). Correspondence includes communications with gay-identified individuals requesting information about connecting to other homosexuals either in their hometowns or in New York City as well as young men interested in information about draft deferment. Also of interest is a letter of support from the critic Eric Bentley, Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University. At the end of the series is a 1982 letter from Robert A. Martin offering his account of the founding of the Student Homophile League as well as SHL's participation in the 1968 strike at Columbia University. In addition to office records, this series also includes documents relating to the homophile movement outside of Columbia University. These materials include pamphlets, clippings and resolutions addressing the national homophile movement as well as memos, informational fliers and addresses from other chapters of the Student Homophile League established after Columbia's chapter, which operated as the center of the organization.

The Collegiate Course for Women was Columbia's first attempt to offer women limited access to the undergraduate program. The women students needed to pass the same entrance examinations for Columbia College as the male students and they could enroll in the same courses as the male students. However, the women were not allowed to attend the lectures with the male students. The women would meet with the professors at the beginning of the semester, receive a copy of the syllabus and the required readings, and they could then study on their own for the rest of the semester to prepare for the course examinations. Under these challenging circumstances, Mary Parsons Hankey became the first woman to receive her undergraduate degree from Columbia College in 1887. From 1883 to 1889, the Collegiate Course for Women enrolled 99 students but awarded only 8 degrees. The Collegiate Course for Women was ended once Barnard College opened its doors in 1889. The information about the program is included in the Handbook for Information. The course descriptions appear in the section for the School of Arts, the men's undegraduate program.

Series 2, Village Voice, contains materials created during Durbin's time at The Village Voice as Staff Writer, Senior Editor, Arts Editor, and Editor-in-Chief, spanning 1975-2002. The years that Durbin served as editor-in-chief for the newspaper (1994-1996) are well documented not only through the preserved press coverage and correspondence regarding Durbin's work, but also through meeting notes, budgets, and staffing files. Major moments in the history of The Voice documented in the collection include staff unionization (1977), Leonard Stern's purchase of The Voice (1987), and Free Village Voice (1996)–the newspaper's switch from a paid weekly to a free, alternative weekly. Many of the records in the series are produced by or include Village Voice contributors or executives, such as David Schneiderman, Ellen Willis, Karen Cook, Stan Mack, Nat Hentoff, Clay Felker, Leonard Stern, and Lee Smith.